Armenian composer and pianist Marie Awadis, born in Lebanon and now based in Germany, is known for her intimate, elegantly crafted music and sensitive sound. Centred around the piano, her works aim to express authentic human emotion and draw on the many musical and non-musical influences that have shaped her as an artist, from deeply rooted classical traditions to the folk harmonies and melodies of Armenia.
Deeply committed to composition, she is always eager to explore new paths and combine all her cultural experiences in order to produce work that is as honest and personal as possible. Her creativity is the energy that drives her onwards, informed by her optimistic nature and by the spiritual side of her personality.
Her first collaboration with Deutsche Grammophon dates from 2021, when she contributed the track Alone to the third series of the label’s pioneering contemporary music series “XII”. Awadis has now recorded her debut DG album, Études Mélodiques, a collection of twelve poetic studies for piano. Inspired not only by Chopin but by the contrasting strands of American and European minimalism, Études Mélodiques will be released in September 2024.
Marie Awadis’s grandparents escaped the Armenian genocide for Syria in 1915. Her father later moved to Lebanon, establishing a life for himself among the country’s large Armenian diaspora. Marie absorbed the language and culture of her ancestral homeland at Armenian school while growing up amid civil war in the Lebanon of the late 1970s and 80s. She first went on stage at the age of five, singing with her father’s folk band. Music became a passion and a refuge, and she began taking piano lessons when she was eight. She focused on the classical repertoire, including composers from Bach to Rachmaninoff, and gave solo performances as well as playing chamber music, accompanying choirs and taking part in studio projects. Her curiosity about all genres led her to explore jazz and world music, both of which would have a major impact on her composition style in years to come.
Awadis went on to study at the Lebanese National Conservatory in Beirut. After graduating in piano performance and teaching at the conservatory for three years, she moved to Hanover to pursue postgraduate studies at the city’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater. During her years at the college, she was invited to perform the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Lebanese National Symphony Orchestra.
After this, she moved away from classical piano for a while, but found her way back to it through Armenian classical and traditional music when she started performing solo piano works by various Armenian composers. She now gives concerts in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and has collaborated with a number of different artists both on stage and in the studio.
Having written her first piano piece at the age of sixteen, Awadis rediscovered her passion for composing later in life, when she realised she needed new forms of expression that would enable her to tell her own story in her own way, to reconnect with the space in which she felt safest and to express her feelings in the language of music, a refuge of peace ever since her childhood in a war-torn country. Today, music is her homeland, providing connections to the Armenian, Lebanese and German cultures, all three of which have shaped her life and work.
During the period of transition between performing and composing, she wrote further pieces for solo piano and several works for cello and piano; these were followed by compositions for string quartet and other chamber ensembles, and by choral works. As her career as a composer continues to flourish, she feels strongly that music flows through rather than from her, and that once the notes are on the page they are no longer hers. She begins with a myriad of ideas and improvisations, gradually creating order from compositional chaos. Structure grows out of intuition and emotion, although as a lover of architecture both generally and in the musical sphere, she aspires one day to find a way of applying her intuitive method to initial structural foundations.
Marie Awadis’s previous releases include the albums Echoes (2015), Searching (2017) and Una Corda Diaries (2020), written especially for the unique Klavins Concert Una Corda M189 and recorded on the instrument in Budapest. An EP entitled LUYS, a vocal experiment recorded during the pandemic, came out in November 2023.
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